


In all my dreams, I -

by Yarpfish



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Implied Mental Instability, Rumbelle Secret Santa 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 12:52:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2812667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yarpfish/pseuds/Yarpfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Curse comes closer and closer to casting, Rumplestiltskin feels his sanity slip as his visions increase. Flashes of his future lace with burning memories to choke him. There's a pretty maid who says she cares, but she can't.</p><p>She can't, she can't, she can't, she can't, she can't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In all my dreams, I -

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Rioghna7 on tumblr as part of the Rumbelle Secret Santa 2014. I hope you like it!  
> The prompt was "Cooking together in the Dark Castle".
> 
> I originally intended for this to turn out way fluffier than it did, but it just wasn't working no matter how many times I tried. Apparently at heart I'm an angst girl.

_He is drowning._

_He screams for air but it burns, it burns. The sky is red with fire and blood. In his head echo the terrified screams of women, babes crying out. He can hear men shouting and his own insidious giggle, ragged as he tries to breathe, choking on the magic-thick air._

~

He does not wake with a start. Instead the dream clings to him like tar as he tries to force himself awake.

He is alive.

He pretends not to notice his hands shaking as he summons a fine crystal glass full of whiskey. He stares at it, drains it.

He rises from the shabby cot that serves as his bed, crammed into a corner in his tower, wedged between bookcases and cabinets filled with potion ingredients and volatile trinkets.

He loses himself in spell crafting; low level enchantments he can easily store for when a fool comes calling. Liquid luck, glamours and strength potions. Bottled envy, powdered doubt. As he works mechanically, he lets himself process the vision.

Regina had determined to use the Curse.

He felt…

For so long, _so long_ , he had planned for this. For three hundred years, everything had been leading to this moment. It was…bizarre to believe it was nearly here. He felt lost, as if directionless, even though he had perfected exactly what was going to happen; pieces and events would tumble into place like falling dominoes.

Maybe that was it, he muses, holding a potion of good will to the light to check its consistency and colour. Although technically he was in absolute control, the puppeteer staging the scene, every facet of the plan perfect, now the chain was in motion, it would be nigh on impossible to stop them. For all his planning, now he was in free fall.

Gods above.

~

There is some small kingdom, with some small problem.

On a whim, he takes a pretty girl with a smart mouth as his payment.

~

_He is in agony._

_He feels his kneecap shatter. A jarring, like electricity radiates up his thigh as his calf feels cold and numb. He knows a bone fragment has torn a nerve. He wants to cry out, but the blood in his mouth tells him that instead he is biting his cheek. His moan turns into a choked sob. It hurts._

_But he is in his room, a room that he knows is his own but he does not recognise._

_He is alone._

~

The plan is coming along exactly as it should. Regina suspects nothing, believing herself master of her own destiny, her rage and lust for vengeance blinding her from her own manipulation.

He should feel pleased, or at least…satisfied.

He feels empty.

 _No_.

He felt dread.

He had thought little of life beyond the Curse. For all his planning…the Curse being cast had always been the end goal. Get to the World Without Magic, and everything would fall into place.

Of course that’s not how it worked.

He had forgotten the pain of his shattered, useless leg. Forgotten that no magic meant no magically cured injury. No magic meant…no magic.

~

For the rest of the day, he barely dares put weight on his right side, too afraid of the phantom pain even though he knows it’s ridiculous. The pretty young maid notices him limp, asks if he is ok. He shouts at her until she scurries away, as if she cares.

~

He is sitting at his spinning wheel.

He is lost in his thoughts. Their thoughts. The memories of a hundred Dark Ones flicker as the spokes turn on the wheel. They think of the wars they have started. Wars they have ended. They think of the times they tortured and killed for necessity, and when they did it for fun. They remember the times they were free and when they were trapped. The masters who forced them to do terrible things, things they loved to do but hated the compulsion. They remember how many of those foolish masters died gruesomely at their hands. They think of all the desperate pleas they’ve ever heard, the ones they helped, the ones they ignored.

The gold is stained black from their thoughts.

He wonders why none of them remember the First. They all know they took the power from someone else, some even remember the name. But no one remembers the First.

The thread slides to the ground like oil.

~

The pretty maid squeezes his shoulder, hands him tea. She doesn’t seem to notice the black tar dripping from his hands, his wheel, as he takes it.

He discovers that her name is Belle.

~

_He is trapped._

_He is trapped by rowan and silver and iron. He is dirty, filth caking him. His hair is greasy and limp. The grime clings to him like a second skin, a second cage, causing a crippling claustrophobia that makes his prison so much worse. So much worse._

_somuchworsesomuchworsesomuchworsesomuchworse_

_He hits at the bars, screams._

_Screams because the prison hasn’t trapped him. Iron is for fairies, and rowan for witchcraft, silver for werewolves. No, he is not contained by their naïve wards or their pithy folklore. Not even by the great Reul Ghorm and her squid ink._

_Oh no, he wasn’t trapped. He was waiting exactly where he needed to be. Waiting._

_Only his will held him, and that made it so much worse._

~

The claustrophobia haunts him. He hates it. Hates the feeling of being powerless. He won’t be that useless spinner again. He won’t. hewonthewonthewonthewont.

But he will, he must.

If he doesn’t, he will never know the Saviour’s name. And he will lose.

He cannot stand his tower. Even the huge dining hall traps him, the large walls with endless trinkets pressing like a building pressure in his skull.

He moves to the largest room in his castle, the ballroom.

But the dust and the loneliness and the crumbling magnificence choke him. He is so small in the face of such splendid and wasted opulence.

He wanders outside.

He sits on a hillock, stares out across his land. He has not done this for decades. He is surprised that he will miss his grounds. He remembers sitting and watching his sheep.

There will be no hills in his new kingdom.

~

He is still in the garden well into the afternoon.

Belle finds him, and brings him tea.

~

_He is dreaming._

_The air is warm, and smells of soot from the fire. Milah has her back to him, her hips swaying slightly as she sings and cooks. He is at his wheel, smiling as he watches his wife move around the tiny room. This is from the early days of their marriage. Before the war took their happiness (or at least their contentment), his leg, and their future._

_Milah was never a good cook, but then again, he could never afford to buy her anything decent to go in the pot. But they were warm, and the food made up in calories what it lacked in taste._

_"The ship it swayed_

_Heave ho, heave ho,_

_On a dark and stormy blue._

_And I held tight to the Captain’s might_

_As he pulled up his trews."_

_~_

He never did much like that song.

Especially not after Milah found Killian.

 __~

Sometimes, his memories are worse than the visions. To wake peacefully, the memory of domesticity and comfort lingering simply brought into sharp relief all that he had lost, and the long lonely years he had gained. On those mornings, he woke not as the Dark One, but as a tired old spinner, with a wife who hated him and a son he wasn’t good enough for, now both gone.

He is never motivated on these days.

He sighs, begins to spin.

But the empty hall makes the creak seem louder, like a great ship groaning. And the echoing makes him feel alone. It is too close to his dreams.

He does not have the heart to scream.

~

Belle is not a good cook. As a highborn lady before her servitude _no no no no no no employment not slavery no no no no_ she had scarcely ever been in a kitchen, except to steal biscuits as a small girl. Her first few meals had been…barely food anymore, but she was determined, stubbornly trying again and again until she could make a passable stew. The night he ate dinner without a grimace, she smiled and mentioned wanting to learn to do more.

He never did acknowledge the cookery books that appeared in the kitchen one day, and she never drew attention to it.

~

_There is a pain in his chest. It quickly radiates out burning him in agonising heat. But what follows is worse. The numbness tingles as his heart pumps the poison around his body._

_He struggles to breathe._

_What air he desperately manages to force into his frozen lungs tastes of bitter hatred._

_And the ocean._

~

He wanders the halls, restless.

He finds the pretty maid cleaning a suit of armour in a corridor he has never bothered to walk down for centuries.

He stops to watch her, until she notices him. Belle laughs and smiles, teases him that he doesn’t need to check up on the quality of her work.

When he next remembers himself, they have been talking for hours.

He feels at peace.

~

_“You haven’t slept,_

_Heave ho,” he said_

_“In many suns and moons.”_

_Oh, I will sleep when we reach shore_

_And pray we get there soon._

~

He notices he is roaming his halls far more than he ever used to care for. The Castle, like so many parts of him, is for show, to draw a curtain of power and fear between himself and the desperate souls he dealt with. Beyond his tower and the vast dining hall that displays his wheel and his most gruesome and most treasured payments, he has little use for most other rooms.

He does not allow himself to think why he, a creature of habits, has developed a new tick.

It most certainly isn’t because of the possibility of seeing the pretty maid, who will look him directly in the eyes…

 

And smile.

~

A foolish prince arrives at his door, all aristocratic assurance and velvet pretension. He does not recognise the boy who is barely a man. But the waving sword aggravates him, turns him into a rose.

Belle had mentioned her mother’s flower garden that morning.

~

_The Captain howled_

_“Heave ho! Heave ho!”_

_And tied me up with sheets._

_“A storm is brewing in the South,_

_It’s time you go to_ sleep.”

~

There is singing in the Dark Castle.

He can sense the Castle is as confused as he is, carrying the song through the air as if asking a question.

He follows the sound, finds the kitchen.

It is bright and clean, a fire roaring in the grate, something bubbling in a cauldron above it.

Belle has her back to him, her hips swaying slightly as she sings, working on something at the table.  Only this close does he recognise the song. He had not heard it in centuries, but for his dreams. A song that Milah always loved.

_“His berth it rocked,_

_Heave ho, heave ho,_

_The ocean gnashed and moaned._

_Like Jonah will be swallowed whole,_

_And spat out teeth and bone.”_

“That’s an interesting song, dearie.” He allows himself to giggle as she jumps, startled.

“Rumple!” She laughs and before trying to school her face into a serious expression, “it’s rude to sneak up on people you know,” She speaks as if he is some naughty pet, not one of the most feared men in all creation.

He does not rise to the bait, pursues on “how does a girl like you know about a song like that?”

She smiles, a little sheepishly. He notices she has flour on her face. “My nanny used to sing it when she was kneading bread. She said it had a good rhythm to it. I thought it would help me in my baking.”

He looks for the first time at her creation on the table.

It is rather pathetic.

He sighs, pulls up his sleeves.

“You’re not using enough force, you really need to put your weight into it.” He gently elbows her so she steps aside, pushing his own hands into the sad beige blob, “how long did you rest the dough for?”  
“A half hour perhaps”  
“It needs longer, it needs to be about twice the size of your original dough.”

She gives a frustrated sigh “well if the book would _say_ that.”

Recipe books, she told him, assumed on a lot of implicit knowledge. What a properly-rested dough should look like, what made a good stock, how to gut and scale fish, how to crack eggs without getting shell in _everything_. Things girls learnt from watching their mothers, or scullery maids from the cook. Things that never needed to be written because they were said, shown until the movements were engraved in your bones.

He is amused how Belle spoke as if the books had betrayed her, as if they were a secretive lover.

He sighs dramatically, “Well it would hardly do if the Dark One was found to be undone by his housekeeper’s culinary ineptitude.”

“Think of your reputation,” Belle teased back.  

~

Belle picks a recipe from the vast and battered book she had decided as her favourite, and he would help, translating for her the assumed knowledge laced in the words into practical advice she could understand.

She is a quick learner, and soon didn’t need his help.

~

He stops coming to the kitchen.

He pretends he doesn’t notice that she looks hurt.

~

It is a month after he has stopped helping her. Belle brings him a book with his tea. _1001 Recipes from Agrabah._

“I was thinking of trying something from here later, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it by myself.”

~

When they grow bored of dates and spices, of honeyed pastry, he mentions offhand that he’s sure he saw an Atlantean cookbook in the library somewhere.

~

He is selfish, he knows, keeping her here.

He knows his darkness is crushing her light, though she does not see it yet.

He sends her to the town and pretends that he does not mourn her.

~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~

She is gone.

~

He does not dare scry for her after she….. _after he threw her out after she betrayed him after it was a trap all along after he nearly fell for her trick after she made him feel human_. After she left. He tells himself he does not care. His mistake is in the past, to be learnt from but otherwise ignored.

But he cannot bear to see her, happy in her small little kingdom, or by Regina’s side.

And he does not dare to think that perhaps she hadn’t lied.

~  
_The sky, it flashed_

_Heave ho, heave ho,_

_His pillow toed to the brink._

_The curtains ran between my legs_

_As we began to sink._

~

It has come.

The day he has dreamt of and planned for.

The day he created.

He can feel the magic in the air. It crackles in his ears, feels like oil on his skin. It smells of rotten flesh. Each breath is thicker, harder.

He hears screams. Some of them are his own.

He can’t stop laughing.

~

_I closed my eyes_

_Heave ho, heave ho,_

_As the ship was rent and fell._

_Eddies in the water headed_

_To the mouth of Hell._

_~_

“Belle.”

He breathes her name like it’s a prayer.

 

 

 

And he drowns.

**Author's Note:**

> The song is "In All My Dreams I Drown" from the Devil's Carnival. I was struggling to find a folk song I felt really went with what I was writing, and as I was already using drowning themes it seemed perfect.


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